Reader Writes - January 2021
Should we be entertained or terrified by the spectacle of the US presidential election? Donald Trump’s desperate and dangerous attempts to throw a legal and democratic vote have transgressed all conventions and norms of the last 100 years. A Wisconsin placard captured both the risible and the sinister in this spectacle with “Make Orwell fiction again”. Amen to that! American democracy has always been rougher than we are used to; after all, there was a savage civil war only a century and a half ago, and the progress from slavery, through segregation to contemporary inequality is stored in the folk memory. Orwell’s Ministry of Truth and the despotic power of “The Party” make fiction seem eerily familiar.
What we see and deplore in The States, we can recognise and trace, sometimes more faintly, in our own politics. Populism thrives on simplicity and conflict. Votes may be won through antagonism, but the price, as seen among Trump’s base, is enduring resentment and distrust of the electoral facts. Polarity is stoked up until cultural civil war wrecks the vision of common endeavour and reconciliation. We share, with the US and others, a contemporary erosion of respect for facts and truth. In Orwellian style, “doublethink” seems to control reality; our own Vote Leave campaign has seared our national conscience. Distinguishing truth from falsehood must be the moral bedrock of a functioning democracy. A shared truth allows mutual trust, notwithstanding healthy debate and disagreement; and falsehood is the heart of totalitarianism.
Am I being ridiculous or was I right to hunt out my copy of Stefan Zweig’s searing memoire of pre-War central Europe? He was a Viennese writer and a Jew who experienced the horror of WW1, the debacle of the peace, and the rise of Fascism feeding relentlessly on resentment and poverty. He saw it all happening before his eyes, and when he left Vienna for sanctuary in London, he couldn’t make his British friends (or even his Viennese friends) believe that the world was in grave danger. They all despised Hitler and carried on with life. This is how Zweig saw it in Britain: “they persisted in the delusion that a man’s word was his bond, a treaty was a treaty, and they could negotiate with Hitler…. They could not or would not see that a new technique of deliberate or cynical amorality was being built up.”
I am only now learning to pay attention to the word amorality. When our government flagrantly hides the truth, or bends the truth or invents the truth, it is not being immoral; they conduct politics and indeed government, by different (amoral) rules. Power makes the facts what they will. It sounds like the Ministry of Truth; I must dig out a copy of 1984.
The prophet Zechariah, writing to the Jews in exile after the Babylonian conquest, wrote ‘“Speak the truth to each other, and render true and sound judgement in your courts; …and do not love to swear falsely. I hate all this,” declares the Lord’. All through scripture truth is prescribed; no, required! Christian faith rests on the truth of the good news of the gospel. Jesus himself declared that he was “the way, and the truth and the life”. And our consent to be governed under democratic institutions depends on shared truth and mutual trust. Christians, of all people, must stand up for truth.
Robert MacCurrach